Addition, magic, community. Bluesky & the Fediverse.

How 3 + 0 adds up to more than 1 + 2

This week Bluesky added over a million users. It’s taken a lot of moving parts coming together to get to this. Over in the Fediverse the parts are still being maneuvered into place. Ghost moved into ActivityPub beta. Bonfire launched Mosaic. Heidi Feldman and the Kamala Harris News group are doing an incredible job fundraising and organising for the US election. And Jon Pincus is starting to set out a whole bunch of reasons to be cheerful.

Laurens Hof, as always ahead of his time, has been saying for a while that Bluesky is the best place for big public conversations, and the Fediverse is best for local communities. Let’s get into it.

Bluesky takes off. Again

“Atproto for public-global, activitypub for local semi networked communities seems like the most likely direction this space will go” Laurens Hof 

Earlier this month it was Brazil. Now Bluesky’s explosive growth is more widespread, with new users coming from the US, Thailand, Korea and Japan (more), as Elon Musk removes blocking from Twitter. Increasingly, Bluesky is the obvious choice for mass migration. I’ve already argued that this is a good thing for the Fediverse. And Bluesky put a lot of work in to get where it can take on this level of growth:

• Easy, familiar UI (now with video, pinned posts and more - new stuff is added pretty much monthly)
• Great onboarding. Starter packs are just amazing.
• Curated communities. Custom feeds are baked in.
• Effective moderation. 
• Well designed, highly scalable infrastructure.

At the moment Bluesky is very much in the sweet spot, and getting the kind of big public network effect Laurens foretold.

Trouble at Threads

 “People. Not platforms.” Anuj Ahooja 

Meanwhile over on Threads there’s a lot of turmoil. For some, the promise of two-way federation seemed to make it worth giving Meta a chance*. Or at least including it in your POSSE mix. Now it’s not looking so good. The numbers may be big, but the vibe, which was always pretty staid, is stalling even more.

To start with people tried Threads, then moved on. A few stuck around. As it picked up momentum, it moved into a moderately successful middle period. A few communities coalesced - like NBA Threads, or Photographers of Threads. The tech journalism and blogging community went all in. And quite a few other journalists and commentators ignored the no-politics diktat (and the bigger issues with Meta) to make it their home. 

But coming from a background of Instagram, built around individual creators and influencers, Threads has no idea how to handle communities. They need nurturing, backed up by careful moderation. It’s the moderation which has turned out to be Threads’ achilles heel, blocking key community leaders, and provoking a flight to Bluesky. Anuj Ahooja, originally a backer of the community-based Threads, is amongst those moving on. 

In the new post-Twitter world, people and communities are a lot less sticky. 

They’ve moved once, now they’re happy to move again. (This also applies to Bluesky - most of the Brazilians who joined went back to Twitter once it started up again). What’s more there’s no sign of Threads implementing two-way federation. Legal issues look likely to delay it indefinitely.

*For very strong reasons not to do this, see Erin Kissane on Meta in Myanmar.

Back to the Future: New Social magic

 “Do you remember the first time you thought the web was magic?” Molly White, XOXO 

Over in the Fediverse (as more narrowly defined) the numbers aren’t moving. I’d argue that’s partly because the Fediverse is still working out the best way forward, and partly because we’re all working in different ways. 

Fediverse 1.0, the clone wars, and Fediverse 2.0, putting plumbing first, aren’t enough on their own to get us where want to go. See my blog on Brazil, Bluesky and the Fediverse. 

Some people, including The Newsmast Foundation, are trying to build a Fediverse 3.0 (we’re experimenting with calling it New Social) working across protocols, platforms and formats. That’s not just the Fediverse, Bluesky and Nostr. As Bart Decrem argues, it’s RSS too. And blogs, and podcasts. The whole web, or a network the size of the whole web - a dream which Ben Werdmuller sets out in a recent Dot Social podcast interview. 

That’s something really exciting. Bluesky’s growth is a big part of this - as are Flipboard and Ghost. Joan Westenburg just migrated The Index to micro.blog - a great example of the breadth of the POSSE based approach. Molly White paints a picture of what’s possible, if we return to what the web was originally all about. 

Back to the Future II: Community building

And then there’s something else, the flip side of what Laurens is talking about. Small and medium sized communities. A place where people feel safe, and can breathe. That feels good already. Calm. In the public discourse around the Fediverse the joy and power of this was lost in talk around problems finding servers when onboarding, server battles, and lost data when servers close. That’s a shame. Because deep down the Fediverse can be something seriously, deeply good. Erin Kissane is picking up this movement - it’s where she’s always been:

“The rarest and best of [the unique gifts of the fediverse]...is that if they’re motivated, tooled up, plugged into communities of support, and connected to their members' needs, small and medium-sized fediverse servers can provide context-sensitive, high-touch local moderation and adjudication for their members—while also making available connections to a broad landscape of other well-governed servers.” Erin Kissane, wreckage/salvage

Governance is at the heart of this. Erin’s new blog post, setting out some of the conditions for small and medium servers to thrive, draws on a seminal piece of research which Erin and Darius Kazemi published over the summer on Fediverse Governance. There’s a whole bunch of other people working in this space too, inside and outside the Fediverse. New_ Public are one. Nathan Schneider is another - and the co-ops and collectives he and the Media Economies Design Lab work with. There are also small, strong communities being built around hashtags and feeds, as we found in our research project Mapping the Fediverse. Jon Pincus (linked here on a newly federated NodeBB) is starting to highlight a range of positive initiatives for an upcoming Nexus of Privacy blog post. And of course there’s the original Fediverse 0.0. Servers, software and people who kept going while the clone wars waged around them. These are great places to start. 

Wins aren’t always onboarding over a million new users in 36 hours. They can also be nurturing a community of 100s or 1000’s, bringing people together for the greater good over many, many years. 

“We can have a different web”

Building a different web and bringing back its magic means choosing what matters. Making the most of the bridge with Bluesky. Turning people first, post once social media - Fediverse 3.0 - into a reality. And nurturing communities through small and medium sized servers, feeds, hashtags and Fediverse 0.0.

Laurens Hof, Anuj Ahooja, Molly White and Erin Kissane. Now that’s a club worth joining.